a place to express. not impress.

Wind-Chasing in Montenegro

“The Maestral wind comes from west or south west. It is a pleasant wind as it brings refreshment after the heat during the hottest summer hours. It is most intensive between 2PM and 3PM” some Montenegro tourist website tells me. What it doesn’t say, though, is that, as with any other wind, the Maestral wind can be capricious. In the passing moments of heat between 2 and 3 pm – it can make you wait. It can make you want it real bad.

No day has been the same ever since I first set my foot in the Balkans. It’s messy here, things can get messy, though I’m learning to accept the fact that it’s just how it rolls. Naturally. Almost organically.

“Troppo organizzato” says the owner of the house where I’m staying when I ask him why he didn’t stay in Switzerland where he’s spent 36 years of his life. His broken Italian skills (not quite as broken as mine) seem to be the only “souvenir” he’s brought back from the German-French-Italian-speaking Rolex land.

“It feels like you’re always being watched, you have to turn up to places at set times, there’s no freedom – you’re almost like a robot there”, he says trying to explain why he’s exchanged the Swiss Alps for the Black Mountain views that gave the country its name of Monte-Negro.

There’s no time to waste. There’s no time to sit and think and wait for something to happen. That’s how we were taught. That’s how we were raised. The time for inefficiency is meant to be taken out of the calendar. If we could, we would probably stop breathing too, ‘coz that’s not very efficient.

Capricious Maestral wind teaches you something else. Much like the Balkan ways, it teaches you to stop. It teaches you to obey. Obey the time, obey the laws of nature. It teaches you that things might not always go the way you planned them and that sometimes you just have to sit and watch the world go by. There are times when you simply have to allow things to happen.

I’m yet to learn new things and yet I take it that UN-learning things is my main lesson. I’ve accepted Maestral wind for a teacher – now I wait.